Dave McHugh, Gordon Mann and I are headed to Las Vegas this week for the second iteration of the D3hoops.com Classic. Gordon and Dave live in the Mid-Atlantic snow zone, so we hope they get there.

But this isn’t the first D3hoops.com Classic. A decade ago at this time, we were hosting a D3hoops.com Classic ourselves at Catholic U., in Washington, D.C. Mike Lonergan, who was then the men’s basketball coach and is now the head coach at Vermont, approached me a few months earlier after having lost a title sponsor for his holiday tournament, asking if we would step in for the sum of $2,000. Catholic won the tournament, with Hobart, Plymouth State and Roger Williams. Catholic went on to win the national title that year. So there’s precedent!

Somewhere I still have a t-shirt or two. We broadcast the games on the Internet — audio only, since this was 2000, but it was not particularly widespread at the time. And we still recorded games on cassette tape at the time. For a couple years thereafter, we got emails from schools asking if we were going to do another one, but it was a one-time shot.

Those were great times for us. A year earlier we had launched D3football.com and it was a great success. But the dot-com crash was about to hit, and that $2,000 nearly bankrupted us. This time, the tournament is run by Sport Tours International, it’s in Las Vegas (30 degrees warmer than Minneapolis!) and we’re going to have three Top 25 men’s teams and one Top 25 women’s team in the building.

That is, if they all get out of the snow zone themselves! Coverage starts today with No. 4 UW-Stevens Point taking on No. 20 Ramapo. You can get more coverage of the Classic, including live video, on our Classic page and we will post stories and such throughout.